Help improve these maps!

OpenStreetMap is made by people like you. If a cycle path, road, pub or café is missing, just head in and add it. It’ll then be available to thousands of other cyclists using cycle.travel, OpenCycleMap, CycleStreets, Sustrans’ printed maps and many other projects: we all take the same data and add our own spin to it.

Here at cycle.travel we’ve supported OpenStreetMap since its first months back in 2004; we’ve mapped countless miles of cycle routes and contributed a lot of the code that’s been used in the project over the years.

How cycle.travel uses OSM data

We do a lot of processing work to make the raw OSM map as useful as possible for cyclists. If you’re editing OSM, here are some of the things to keep in mind:

We use the surface= tag to determine how suitable a path is for cycling. We look for the values asphalt, paved, concrete, tarmac, paving_stones, compacted, gravel, ground, earth, cobblestone, grass, unpaved, dirt, and sand in roughly that order (the ones at the start are better). You can use the tracktype tag as an alternative.

If there’s no surface tag, we broadly assume cycleways are tarmac, tracks are gravel, and bridleways are dirt (though with a few local adjustments).

In the UK, our route-planner only uses highway=track if there’s also bicycle=yes or access=yes. (Otherwise it might be a private farm track.)

In rural areas of the US, we avoid highway=residential where the tiger:reviewed=no tag is still present, unless we have evidence to the contrary (e.g. a surface tag).

We use route relations for NCN and local bike routes, not the old ncn_ref tag.

We also use Ordnance Survey data for UK built-up areas, Corine data for European built-up areas, and government open data for North America. We use both Ordnance Survey and NASA data for elevation.

If you find something missing or misleading in our maps and directions, head over to OpenStreetMap to fix it. But if OSM’s right, and cycle.travel isn’t doing what you’d expect with the data, we want to know. Post in the cycle.travel site forum and let us know what you think.

Sorry, no API

Sorry, we can’t offer third-party access to our maps or to our routing service. Our hardware is dedicated to serving visitors to cycle.travel. Our (significant) costs are covered by advertising, so we can only provide the maps and routing on this site, where our advertising is shown.

We hope to offer a mobile app in the medium term which will provide access to our maps. Until then, please don’t try and access our maps from third-party apps (including offline downloaders and ‘scrapers’); we really don’t want to have to serve up unpleasant bogus tiles to apps that use them without permission. Thanks!